The expression “buddy finder” is used within a telecommunications context and refers to a specific social networking service. The service is provided to registered users of electronic communications equipment, such as mobile telephones and network-enabled palmtop computers, etc. The service alerts a first user to the fact that a second user, who is listed with the service as a buddy of the first user, is currently located within a pre-determined distance from the geographic location of the first user. The service determines the geographic locations of a mobile communication device based on, e.g., identifying in which cell the communication device is currently located based on the location of the base station of the mobile telephone network that receives the strongest signal from the mobile device, or on triangulation of the signals from the device received at multiple base stations.
When a person “A” has registered with the buddy finder service, data representative of the geographical location of the mobile telephone of person “A” is uploaded to a server. At the server, the data can be used to alert another person “B”, e.g., registered with the service as allowed by person “A” to be alerted, to the current geographic location of person “A”. The alerting then uses, e.g., the mobile phone or other mobile, network enabled computing device of person “B”. The relevant geographic location can be indicated as a certain mark in a geographic map rendered at the mobile telephone of person “B”. The alerting may be made conditional depending on the magnitude of the distance between the geographic locations determined for persons “A” and “B”.
For some general background on buddy finder services and technologies, please see, e.g., US patent application publication 20020183052; Japanese patent application publication JP 2003-153522; and European patent application publication 1 691 565.